Fallout 3
Wee! I finally got to play Fallout 3.
I had simultaneously both my hopes and fears completely validated. I’m not sure how this happened. I definitely enjoy it, but at the same time I feel like it really is a side game, not quite up the standards of classic Fallout. Very engaging on its own terms.
On the one hand, I don’t mind the FPS perspective, and it does work with the starkness of the location in putting you into the game. A downside is that I had to push the brightness up about 3 notches to see anything, as the game was obnoxiously dim except in broad daylight.
The game is a little stupid about challenges, and the Deathclaws in F3 are probably the most absurd version in any Fallout game. In F1, they were dangerous, yes, but not unstoppable killing machines. IN F2, they were prbbaly enountered sooner but still a deafeatable opponent. In F3, I just die upon facing them, and sadly so does every other NPC in the game, leading to a bad situation where they sometimes spawn near towns and wipe the place out, making it the one dark spot in the levelled enemies. As in, Bethesda finally got it right, so it amounts to haing slightly-more-powerful versions of old enemies rather than unstoppable new ones. Except for the Deathclaws.
I noticed pretty quick that, in addition to stages being laid out a little oddly. Let’s be blunt: when you’ve been in one wrecked building half-collapsed into a ridiculously complicated maze that also has one and only one path to get to the far end, you’ve been in them all. The random and insipid enemy placement from Oblivion returns, although sometimes enemies will realize you’re in the next room and you get several to fight at once.
Since the game has a little too much dungeon in it and not nearly enough “role”, it gets pretty thin after a while. It gets to the point where I really want to slap the level designer on the secondary game aspects. Fortunately, since I am not (and never do) proceed straight through with the main questline, I get to happily go into the really cool areas, like the museum of technology, and explore them at intervels.
I don’t like attributes too much. In previous Fallouts they were important primarily because they affected the hidden target numbers behind the game system. However, this mostly drops off, and in F3 the fact they do little except boost stills makes them not all that worthwhile. With the exception of Endurance, Intelligence, and Agility, I don’t really need them for much. That’s something of a shame. I mean, I never had the sense (as in F1&2 and even Tactics) that I was making a hard choice. Here, it’s just “if you want melee, pump strength, otherwise ignore.”
Skills are a little dodgy: I feel like I’m somehow supposed to be levelling up almost everything, but so many of them are “required, but” skills. As in, they are virtually required, but they aren’t very interesting.
The Science mini-game ot hack things, is not very fun and used rarely. When you do use it, I just back out when I’m about to lock myself out and try again. This would not be a sin except it is required, as there’s simply no way to reliably get the answer even if you’re Einstein with a dictionary crammed up your nose. But it gets boring, particularly since there’s rarely anything worth having.
Repair I increase mostly for the convenience factor, but I don’t get excited about it (note: in future, MANY more schematics!). The game really needs a Repair Kit that I can take Condition from to boost gear I find (or more accurately, the gear I want to keep).
For some reason, I love Lockpicking. It’s stupidly easy, but I still love it to death.
I really don’t understand what the various gun skills do. They seem to have a slight impact on scatter out of VAts and accuracy in VATS, but not too critical, and maybe a little damage boost.
Explosives: Thu far, entirely useless excepting the quest in Megaton.
My reccomendations are:
Repair Kits!
Strength might be a limited on the armor you can even wear outright, giving more of a reason to don Power armor (since it carries a Strength boost, almost anyone could use it).
Perception should help you notice things. Or add-in a skills for this. The more points, the easier it is to spot noticable things. This didn’t work too well in Vampire: Bloodlines, but it was a good idea. In Fallout, too, there’s a lot more worthwhile stuff to dig through and collect.
Endurance already does a lot (heck: virtually everything) for you. You could add a 5 lb.-per Endurance carry bonus.
Charisma: Charms should perhaps open up the ability to influence people. This would require additional AI work. What I mean is that the more Charisma you have, the better maximum you have on people liking you. You can use a minigame to make them like you more. This would affect their behavior towards you. If they really, really like you, they’ll give you stuff, discounts, and might even give you some of their special equipment if they have any. Characters in the game with special equipment quite frequently have no way for the player to get it, so all the “cool bonuses” go to waste.
Intelligence: I’d like to see this be used to evaluate difficulties of tasks. You wouldn’t just magically know how hard something was to do, but it would be closer to the actual value based on your Int stat.
Agility: This should perhaps enable you to move faster and lower the enemy’s chances to hit you in combat.
Luck: This should help you out randomly, but noticably. I mean things more than getting extra critical hits, like finding extra goodies and whatnot.
The game really needs a couple more skills loaded in. Right now gameplay is just a little thin on the social side.
Barter needs some serious working or re-working. It’s always been the bastard stepchild of Fallout.
